How Titanic’s Legacy Changed Naval Warfare Forever

The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 had sent a shockwave around the world. If this supposedly unsinkable ship could be lost on its maiden voyage, along with so many lives, suddenly the whole world appeared less secure. Few could have predicted the carnage that was to follow, with war and hardship on a scale never previously imagined. Soon, loss of life at sea would become commonplace as warships grew in size and power, and merchant ships became the target of choice for both sides. Maritime tragedies to rival the death toll of the Titanic began to fill the pages of history. But for Holland & Wolff, the company that built the Titanic, war brought opportunity. Visionary leadership allowed the company not only to survive, it actually prospered during the worst ravages of the war. The tonnage lost in the massive battles at sea had to be replaced, and it was the shipyard at Queen's Island that stepped up to the mark. At the start of the 20th century, Holland & Wolff in the north of Ireland was officially the biggest shipyard in the world. Its close partnership with the White Star Line had brought success and prosperity beyond belief. As White Star battled it out with rival Cunard and other European lines, passenger ships had grown ever more massive, culminating in the Olympic-class liners, the largest ships in the world. But that had all changed now, as the sinking of the Titanic became the single greatest maritime disaster in history, and still the most talked about to this day. Just as the passenger companies battled for commercial supremacy in the Atlantic, so the real shipping arms race between the navies of Britain and Germany brought Europe ever closer to war. And in the same way that the largest passenger ships were due to the vision of just one man, Holland & Wolff chairman Lord Perry, so the mightiest warships owed their existence to one individual military thinker. Admiral John or Buffnut Fisher, affectionately known as Jackie, was undeniably the greatest Royal Navy Admiral since Lord Nelson. Indeed his first ship was the HMS Victory, Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar. Never the most conventional of men, Lord Fisher had an amazing ability for getting things done, and he demonstrated both qualities in abundance by walking around the admiralty with a sign around his neck saying, I have no work to do. But it was his first sea lord, in the years immediately preceding World War I, that Jackie Fisher was to exert his strongest influence. Fisher was determined to drag the aging British fleet out of the Victorian era, and the Kaiser's rapidly expanding navy gave him just the excuse he needed. He scrapped many of the older ships, dismissing them as a miser's horde of useless junk, too weak to fight and too slow to run away. In their place, he introduced his precious all-big-gun warships, starting with the HMS Dreadnought in 1906. As well as 15-inch guns, these ships had the sheer locomotive force of massive steam turbine engines, but were built with lighter armor to offset the extra weight. Speed is armor, as Fisher put it. The German philosophy was different, with smaller guns and engines, their fleet sacrificed gun caliber and speed for the protection of much thicker armor. So, the Germans were geared up for close combat at sea, but the British still planned to keep their distance. Lord Fisher's strategy was well conceived, but the theory still had to be tested in anger. Meanwhile, the aftermath of the Titanic disaster was beginning to play out across the world. Britain's Board of Trade was severely criticized for failing to update its safety regulations, as passenger liners grew ever bigger. The owners of the ship, the White Star Line, fared little better. Although no formal charge was brought against the company, and it never had to pay out a single penny in compensation, it was privately criticized for disregarding the safety of its passengers. Chairman J. Bruce Ismay, branded a coward for taking a place in a lifeboat, was forced to resign. It was the beginning of the end for the White Star Line. For Holland and Wolf, there was surprisingly little negative effect, at least financially. Cleared of any blame, even praised for its workmanship, the shipyards still received payment for the Titanic. After all, as people in Belfast are still fond of saying, she was all right when she left here. All ships, new and old, had to comply with updated safety rules, and ironically, it was the island men who would carry out many of the necessary alterations. The first of the Titanic's sister ships, the Olympic, returned to Belfast for a substantial refit, and by the end of the year in which the Titanic sank, Holland and Wolf's profits had actually increased. Work had also started on the third sister, the Gigantic, to be the biggest and finest of them all. But the public now had less of an appetite for such self-aggrandizing names, and it was quietly changed to the more regal sounding RMS Britannic. But the events that were to follow meant that she would never sail as a passenger ship. With the outbreak of the Great War, Germany soon demonstrated that not all of her naval efforts had been expended in developing surface warships. They had a new breed of craft, one that would prove even more deadly in this conflict and the next. Its name, of course, was the U-boat. For the first few months of the war, U-boats operated within the rules of engagement, known as the prize rules. Previously agreed to by both sides, these basically said that passenger ships were off limits, and merchant ships could only be attacked once the crew were out of harm's way. Only warships could be sunk without warning. But these had been laid down during more civilized times, the era of sailing ships, and Lord Fisher had foreseen that applying them to submarines would be pointless. There is nothing a submarine can do except sink or capture, he argued. What if the Germans were to use submarines against commerce without restriction? The response of the first Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, was as dismissive as it was wrong. He simply refused a countenance that any civilized nation could sink to such low treachery. But before long, Lord Fisher's premonition came true, and merchant ships became the U-boat's primary target. As the conflict escalated, Churchill lost no time in calling upon the full resources of the world's finest shipbuilders. He immediately ordered a fleet of battleships from Harland and Wolfe. This might have seemed optimistic, given that the yard hadn't built a warship in more than 30 years. But then, this was to be no ordinary fleet. What Churchill wanted was a flotilla of fakes. Ten cargo ships converted to look like battleships, each a copy of a real warship. The purpose of this so-called special service squadron was, in his words, to confuse and mystify the enemy, to baffle and distract from the enterprise of his submarines. The order was soon increased to 14, and no fewer than 2,000 highly skilled craftsmen worked day and night to fashion turrets and guns out of wood, canvas, and whatever they could lay their hands on. The entire conversion from merchant vessels to battleships took just 10 weeks, and the results, frankly, rubbish. It's not that these ringers didn't look the part. Some of them actually were good enough to fool some of the enemy, some of the time. But the ships they were built from were a mismatched collection of shapes and sizes. Seen together, this dummy fleet looked more like a carnival sideshow than a real squadron. The whole sorry-looking collection sailed to Scapa Flow in the Orkneys to join the British Grand Fleet, where they were met with disbelief and derision. Under protest, commander of the fleet, Admiral John Jellicoe, tried in vain to find a use for them. They tried to use them initially to lure submarines into ambush, but the U-boats wouldn't take the bait. Then they spent some time in the Mediterranean, where the deception did work briefly. So well, in fact, that one of them got torpedoed. The idea of sinking them caught on, and the British scuttled two of them to act as nothing more than a breakwater in a Greek port. A few did successfully transport troops and supplies, but then they probably could have done this perfectly well without their cunning disguise, a sheep in wolves clothing. By the middle of 1915, no one could find a practical use for the remaining figs, and most returned to Belfast to be restored to their former glory. While the dummy fleet was being made and then unmade again, Admiral Fisher's all-big-gun strategy had faced its first serious test. The Royal Navy had just suffered a humiliating defeat off the coast of Chile. Sir Christopher Craddock had been sent on what was essentially a suicide mission. His ship's crews had been hopelessly unexperienced, and the vessels themselves were typical of the useless junk that Lord Fisher so badly wanted to get rid of. In the Battle of Cornell, as it was called, this near-obsolete squadron was sent to attack some of Germany's finest battlecruisers, led by Admiral von Spee. The German ships, especially the two battlecruisers called the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, had superior speed and guns, and stayed beyond the reach of enemy fire. In a carbon copy of Fisher's proposed tactics, they simply blasted the British into defeat, its first in over a century. Two Royal Navy ships escaped. The other two were lost, with nearly 1,600 crew, including Craddock. Determined to seek revenge, the Admiralty then sent two of its most powerful warships to the South Atlantic. There they rendezvoused with a host of other ships, including cruisers and armed merchantmen, anchoring in Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands in order to refuel. Blissfully unaware of this, von Spee made a fatal error on his return to Germany. He knew that Port Stanley was a vital British communications hub, and he believed it would be totally undefended, and so he resolved to attack. The Germans sailed right into the impressive British squadron, which opened fire with all its might. Still unaware that he was up against some of the fastest warships in the world, von Spee tried to make his escape, but the faster British battlecruisers began to close the gap. Von Spee bravely turned his two most powerful ships, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, to face the fight, hoping his smaller vessels might escape, but it was no use. After a long-range battle lasting four hours, the two German battlecruisers were sunk, and the British went on to hunt down the rest. Revenge for the defeat at Cornell was complete, and Fisher was triumphant that his strategy had been vindicated. Fueled by the success, three more giant battleships were ordered to boats to the Royal Navy, and the largest of these would be built in Belfast. Before that could begin, however, Churchill had instigated a crash program at Holland and Wolfe. The first task was to design and build a series of monitors, heavily armed, shallow-draft boats used for coastal bombardment. This is the M33 Minerva, one of the very monitors ordered by Fisher and Churchill in 1915, and one of only two British warships from the Great War still around today, which is quite an achievement considering she was such a rushed job. She was ordered in March, launched in May, and went into action in June, just three months from start to finish. Her first action was to support the British landings during the failing and ultimately disastrous Gallipoli campaign. The objective was to conquer the Ottoman capital of Istanbul, Constantinople as it was then, providing a safe passage through the strategically valuable Dardanelles Straits. In a series of battles fought over the best part of a year, British, French, Australian, and New Zealand allies were defeated time and time again by Turkish forces under German command. Lord Fisher was against the campaign from the start, but he kept uncharacteristically silent, even as Churchill planned the naval expedition. It's only when the invasion started to go wrong he broke his silence and openly voiced his objections. But when these were ignored by the Admiralty, Admiral Jackie Fisher dramatically tendered his resignation as First Sea Lord, despite urgent pleas from Churchill and the press. Both sides at Gallipoli suffered casualties in excess of a quarter of a million before the Allied forces were eventually compelled to withdraw, having achieved precisely nothing. A resounding disaster for Britain, Gallipoli also cost Churchill his position as First Lord of the Admiralty. From his lofty position as one of the top three commanders in the Royal Navy, Winston Churchill, the British bulldog, who would go on to lead Britain twice as Prime Minister, immediately volunteered for army duty and went off to serve in the trenches of the Western Front. Today it would be like Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld being sacked and a week later find themselves rifle in hand on the streets of Basra. As for the M33 Monitor herself, it wouldn't be fair to let Holland and Wolff take all the credit for this particular ship. By this time, the world's largest shipyard had become so busy that it had to subcontract some of the work out to the world's second largest shipyard. And for that, you had to go all the way to Belfast. It's hard to believe, but at the height of its success, Holland and Wolff's main rival was right next door in the north bank of the lagoon. Workman Clark was known locally as the Wee Yard, but at its peak it employed more than 12,000 men. Founded in the late 1800s by two former Holland and Wolff apprentices, this was the very first shipbuilder to produce cold storage ships for preserving beef and fruit during transport. While it never built anything quite as glamorous as the mighty Olympics, what's incredible is that on two separate occasions, Workman Clark actually produced more annual shipping tonnage than its more famous counterpart across the river. They built ships for many clients, Cunard, dozens of smaller passenger lines in the British Admiralty, as well as jobs sent across from Holland and Wolff, including of course the M33 Monitor. Whatever small part this ship played in the Gallipoli operations, she survived that and the rest of the First World War. She also emerged unscathed from operations in Russia against the Bolsheviks and as a minelayer in World War II. It's hardly surprising she has a reputation as a lucky ship. But for some of the former luxury liners that had emerged from the peacetime battle of the Atlantic, luck was in very short supply. By 1915, Kaiser Wilhelm II had declared the waters around Britain a war zone. Any ship found there faced sinking without warning and Cunard's flagship, the RMS Lusitania, was to become one of the heaviest casualties of this unrestricted U-boat warfare. Having left New York's Pier 54 on the 1st of May 1915, the Lusitania was just off the south coast of Ireland near Kinsale, en route to its first port of call in Queenstown. Her first class passenger list read like a who's who of British and American society and of the nearly 2,000 people on board, 129 were children. In the same waters, a U-boat commanded by Kapitänleutnant Walter Schweiger was making its way back to Germany, having just sunk three vessels in the fastnet area. Low on fuel and with only three torpedoes left, it was pure chance that brought the Lusitania into the U-boat's sights. Schweiger ordered the submarine to submerge and adopt battle stations, then give the command to fire. A single torpedo was launched. 18 minutes later, the ship was gone. Over 1,200 people were lost, including nearly a hundred children. Technically, the Lusitania was a legitimate target. She was a registered naval reserve vessel and she was carrying military supplies in a declared war zone. Nevertheless, there was international outcry. Many neutral nations joined America and Britain in blacklisting Germany and calling for Schweiger to be tried as a war criminal. The dead included 128 Americans and the single incident almost became the Pearl Harbor of its day. United States President Woodrow Wilson showed either remarkable restraint or utter cowardice, depending on your point of view, by responding with a formal protest rather than a declaration of war. Despite the threat from America, the chief of the German naval staff wanted to intensify the U-boat campaign, promising, quite realistically, a collapse of the British fleet within six months before any U.S. intervention could take effect. For the first time, U-boats began sinking ships faster than they could be built. And if this had continued, the outcome of World War I might have been very different. Shortly after the Lusitania, again off the old head of Kinsale, a German U-boat sank the Holland & Wolff-built SS Arabic without warning and taking 44 lives. Once again, Germany received sharp riposte from America and, fearing the consequences, decided on a more cautious response. The prize rules were restored, at least for now. The third of the Olympic trio, now renamed the Britannic, was no less unfortunate. Like many of her kind, she was conscripted as a hospital ship to help with the huge numbers of casualties generated in the Dardanelles campaign. Unlike her sister ships, the Britannic saw no cheering crowds on her maiden voyage, even though she was the largest ship in the world and still would have been, even if the Titanic had survived. Instead, she quietly set sail for the tiny Greek island of Lemnos in the Aegean Sea. Britannic may even have seen her sister ship there, also stripped of her finery and commissioned as a troop carrier. While the Olympic brought as many as 7,000 soldiers at a time to the fight, Britannic's job was to bring home the sick and wounded, taking 3,300 on her first trip back to England. Less than a year later, on just her sixth voyage, she was steaming down the narrow channel between mainland Greece and the island of Kea, with more than 1,000 crew and medical staff on board. At 8am, the bulkhead doors had been opened as the staff were changing shifts. A few minutes later, Britannic was rocked by a huge explosion, struck either by a mine or a torpedo. Violet Jessop was a nurse's aide aboard the ship. Suddenly, there was a dull, deafening roar. Two lifeboats were launched whilst the ship was still moving, with Violet Jessop in one of them. But as the boats were being lowered, they were sucked into the still-turning propellers and shredded to pieces. Unable to swim, she narrowly avoided death by jumping from the lifeboat and so lived to tell the tale of the sinking of the Britannic. All the deck machinery fell into the sea like a child's toys. Then, she took a fearful plunge, her stern rearing hundreds of feet into the air until, with a final roar, she disappeared into the depths, the noise resounding through the water with undreamt of violence. In less than an hour, having never carried a single fair-paying passenger, the second of White Star's ill-fitted Olympic-class liners lay at the bottom of the sea. Fortunately, most people on board survived, but for Violet Jessop, it must have been a frighteningly familiar experience, because she had been a stewardess on board the Olympic under Captain Smith when it had collided with HMS Hawk in 1911, causing severe damage to both ships. And incredibly, she'd been a stewardess on board the Titanic on its maiden voyage, making her the only person to survive all three catastrophes. Back in Belfast, work was now well underway on the first major warship to be built there. In May 1915, the island men had begun laying down the keel of HMS Glorious, a large flagship battlecruiser equipped with four 15-inch guns, but classed as a light cruiser due to a relatively thin armour. This was exactly in keeping with Lord Fisher's strategy, but before she was even completed, that theory would finally face the test of all-out combat in the greatest naval battle of the First World War, and in terms of the sheer number of battleships involved, the greatest of all time. This is the light cruiser HMS Caroline, the only other British warship still around from the 1418 war. She wasn't built in Belfast, but she's been here as a Royal Navy Reserve training ship since 1924. But what makes her particularly special is that she's the only remaining surviving warship from one of the defining moments of the First World War, the Battle of Jutland. In May 1916, Admiral Reinhard Scheer, commander of the German fleet, decided on the incredibly risky strategy of trying to lure a small part of the British fleet out into the North Sea, namely the squadron of battlecruisers commanded by Admiral Sir David Beatty. The plan was to use Beatty's equivalent on the German side, the battlecruiser squadron led by Admiral von Hipper, as bait. Once Beatty had been lured sufficiently far from his home base, Scheer would turn up with the entire German high seas fleet and obliterate them. What the Germans didn't know was that as von Scheer and Hipper planned all this by radio, the British had been listening in and had decoded some of their messages. With Admiral Sir John Jellicoe at the helm, the entire British Grand Fleet was already underway hours before the Germans had even left port. So the British had the biggest guns and the fastest warships. They also had a proven strategy, and this time the element of surprise. So what could possibly go wrong? Well, nothing at first. Beatty's battlecruisers played their part perfectly. His ship sailed out from Scotland to chase Hipper's squadron, which then started retreating towards Scheer's waiting fleet. Instead of continuing to chase them into the trap as the Germans expected, Beatty veered north, forcing the entire German navy to follow them right into the British Grand Fleet, turning the tables on the enemy as the hunter became the hunted. But along the way, the impetuous Beatty lost the advantage of his bigger guns by attacking the Germans at too close a range. Soon he had also lost two of the fastest vessels in the British navy and was famously heard to complain, there's something wrong with our bloody ships today. In practice and in combat, the Royal Navy had become so obsessed with firing their guns quickly that they'd missed the main goal of warfare at sea, which is to hit the enemy ships. What followed was a classic example of the fog of war, both figuratively and literally. As Beatty's crippled squadron pressed ahead, the Battle of Jutland raged on. Heavy haze plus the battle caused widespread confusion and obscured vital signals. Through miscommunication from Beatty and plain bad intelligence, Jellicoe basically got lost and ended up too close to the enemy, again losing his key advantage. The German guns were more accurate and more reliable, easily blasting holes in the weaker British armour, and many of the British guns were simply too big for the decks they were built on, ripping apart their own ships with every shot fired. The Royal Navy lost 6,000 men and 15 of their finest ships, but remained powerful enough to survive. The German side was hit hard too and von Scheer only escaped with the remainder of his fleet under the cover of night. The Germans claimed a material victory, and it was, but the British were left in control of the North Sea and indeed the oceans of the world, and so for them it was a strategic victory. But in reality, the result of the Battle of Jutland was a decisive dead heat. Many lessons were learned on both sides, not least of which was the importance of effective armour. For HMS Glorious, still unfinished at Holland and Wolfe, it was too late. Jackie Fisher's design flaws were already built in, and the consequences would reach all the way into the next World War. But the immediate effect for both Britain and Germany was a realisation that this type of warfare was far too costly. From then on, the war at sea would concentrate almost exclusively on a girder course, crippling supply lines by attacking merchant ships. Growing ever bolder, Germany's U-boat campaign was now sinking three ships for every one produced. Ironically, it was this fact that would ensure Holland and Wolfe's success through these most difficult of times. Lord Perry had realised that the heavy losses at sea would have to be replaced, and initiated a massive expansion programme to accommodate a surge in production. Many of Holland and Wolfe's rivals diluted their workforce with unskilled labour, leading to friction over wages, but Perry stubbornly maintained the high standards of his excellent men, keeping them keen with bonuses and overtime. The company now had facilities at seven centres throughout Britain, including Glasgow and Liverpool. The Belfast Yard was also expanding massively, with the opening of the East Yard on the Musgrave Channel, specialising in the mass production of what were called standard ships, with interchangeable parts. Holland and Wolfe built a staggering number of merchant ships in the last year of the war, 200,000 tons in 1918 alone, double that of their nearest rivals. Perry's achievements in the industry won him both the position of Comptroller General of Merchant Shipbuilding and the nickname of Modern Noah. Shortly before the war ended, the last of Perry's Olympic liners had her chance to avenge the loss of her sister at the hands of the Germans. For some time, U-boats had been targeting passenger ships and even hospital ships. When Germany issued a declaration making its unrestricted U-boat campaign official, it was the last straw for America, who entered the war on the 16th of April 1917. Just two days earlier, the Olympic had re-entered service after being given a dazzle paint job and fitted with anti-submarine guns. She was given the job of carrying American troops to Europe, and on the 22nd of these voyages, as she entered the declared war zone of British waters, she spotted the German submarine, U-103. The Olympic fired first, but she was too close and she couldn't press her guns enough, and so the shots went straight over the top. The U-boat responded by firing a torpedo, but that missed, and so the captain of the Olympic took it upon himself to ram the enemy submarine, cutting it clean in two. As a result, the Olympic became the only known merchant vessel to sink an enemy warship in the First World War. But if Holland and Wolff's former passenger liner was a resounding success in war, the same could hardly be said of its purpose-built battlecruiser, HMS Glorious. HMS Glorious only saw action once during this war, on the 17th of November 1917. Along with HMS Courageous, she took part in a major operation off Heligoland Bight against German forces involved in mine sweeping operations in order to clear a path for their all-important U-boats. The ships may have been called Glorious and Courageous, but the engagement was neither. Visibility was poor, and the waters were littered with mines belonging to both countries, although neither side was sure of their exact locations. Amid a haze of confusion, the British ships fired literally hundreds of shells, but managed to hit little more than a passing buoy. In fairness, the Germans hadn't done that much damage either, but HMS Glorious had suffered from some heavy self-inflicted wounds. Their repeated firing of her 15-inch guns had ripped through the deck and caused some serious structural damage. Admiral Fisher's design flaw had struck again. For this reason, Glorious was mothballed at the end of the war, but not before she'd had the good fortune to be present on the 21st of November 1918, to witness the surrender of the German high seas fleet. The Great War was finally over, and with it, the age of the great sea battles. The U-boat had proven itself against the vital merchant ships, and would do so again, but this war brought a new technology, one that would take the conflict from the sea to the sky. The aeroplane was in its infancy in 1914, but by the end of the war, it had already progressed from a simple skirting tool to an effective fighting machine. The rise of the plane and both peace and war would eventually reduce the role of the great ships to mere bulk carriers, designed purely for function. More immediately, the end of the hostilities in Europe was just the beginning of Holland and Wolff's troubles. When the guns and bombs stopped, there was a price to pay, and the decades after the war would prove the hardest of all. As economic depression gripped the world, so orders dried up. Workers were let off in their thousands, and the cranes and slipways of the world's largest shipyard stood silent. It looked like it was the end for Holland and Wolff, but history had other plans.